Casamance.

Highlight brand's collections.

Goal.

Casamance is an exclusive designer and manufacturer of woven yarn dyed finished and embroidered fabrics for upholstery and furnishing applications. We were comissionned to create their semi e-commerce platform that provide the entire fabrics catalog (more than 5000 products), collections, the lookbooks, the brand DNA and more, with a high end, near luxury design and feeling.

Answer.

We wanted to create a very simple website, in order to highlight the collections and products. In order to create a modern and glamourous design, we chose an original structure, but not too original to avoid confusion and anti-ergonomics reactions.

What we did.

Consulting

User experience

UI Design

Development

An art direction that comes from catalog design.

For years, Casamance used printed catalogs for their communication, where the collections and products are showcased in bunch of top end photographs. These catalogs are very minimalist to highlights the photographs.

A photography based layout to highlight the collections.

The first thing we wanted to keep is this minimalist touch to provide a clean and easy discovering experience through the magnified photographs. We didn’t want to add a lot of effects that could get over the pictures themselves, a little parallax inside the photographs is enough.

Create links between photographies and products.

A collection is particularly about products. The user would be able to be inspired by the photographs and then see what fabrics has been used. We loved how the products thumbnails comes out as graphic pieces extracted from the photographs. We came with the idea of associating the photographs with thumbnails of the fabrics that has been used on it. The thumbnails would send the user to the product detail page.

Showing the fabrics, realsize.

The product page design is fully based on a simple idea. It’s quite difficult to estimate the fabric quality over a web page. As the Casamance salespersons are working with their client on a tablet, we wanted the zoom function to be improved. This way, by clicking on the picture, a full hi res quality is shown up and scaled up fullscreen, like we were handling the real fabric.

An immersive search engine.

The search engine is simple but immersive. When the user clicks on the search icon, the search engine comes all over the website, so he’s focused on what to search for.

See what's behind designer's ideas.

Before creating a collection, the designers at Casamance collect inspirations, pieces of fabrics, and everything that reflects their ideas and goals and put them onto mood boards. The last thing about the this project is showing the “behind the scenes” as rough as they are. As the entire site plays with fabrics thumbnails as pattern pieces, we wanted to keep this idea in mind and introduce the seasonal lookbook with a quick dynamic blocks artwork made with each product that comes out from this inspiration.

Optimized for mobiles.

It was important to keep the website’s layout and design everywhere. We optimized the website to have a simple but efficient design, and an dedicated ergonomy for each device.